Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

THE GROUP FOR INTERCULTURAL STUDIESIN CENTRAL AND SOUTHEAST EUROPEDuring the last ten years, we have witnessed several attempts to revisit andreconsider the cultural and socio-political history of Central and SoutheastEurope. The “Group for Intercultural Studies” seeks to contribute to the revisionof the hegemonic canons of collective identity in the region, by givinga voice to an emerging local generation of scholars, working on similar topics,educated both in their home countries and in major universities in the West.The aim of our group is to re-contextualize the major academic debateson and within our region, and to re-examine, with a fresh eye, the concepts ofnation, state, regionalism, identity, and modernity, as well as the more recentissues of post-communism, transition or democratic consolidation. In doing so,we would like to collaborate with scholars interested in our region, seeking toreach common grounds of interpretation and mutually acceptable perspectivesof research and to enhance professional intellectual communication and interactionin Central and Southeast Europe.In the framework of our socialization process, we want to combine ouracademic research with its application to more practical activities, which couldcontribute to the formation of a milieu of intercultural dialogue, where the actsof communication are not exemplary gestures, breaking through the institutionalizedsilence, but feature as naturally given, on the basis of which we canturn to discuss and “negotiate” the more substantial problems.Our projects are therefore meant to link the research on historical andcultural consciousness in the region with actually trying to have an impact on it.Having discussed for years the various, mutually exclusive narratives institutionalizedin our educational and cultural systems, we focus our work on themost chronic lacunae of comparative historical thematization in our region.Considering this, we concentrate our activities on the following main directions:ethnicity and nationalism; collective memory and historiographical narrativity;comparative communist and post-communist studies; and comparativecultural studies.It is our intention to contribute to the establishing of a student networkof the major educational institutions from these countries. Furthermore, weseek to launch a program of common socialization for advanced M.A. andPh.D. students from the region, bringing them together for workshops and conductingjoint research. This would mean an important bridge between practicaland academic activities, and could also create an emerging stratum of youngintellectuals experienced in collaboration on an intercultural basis.Margit Feischmidt, Constantin Iordachi, Rãzvan Pârâianu,Cristina Petrescu, Dragoº Petrescu, Zsuzsa Török, Balázs Trencsényi(the founders of the group)379